Does this even matter?

If you think about it, it might be a classic chicken and egg problem. First of all, there’s a possibility that I’m raising a non question. Why in the first place, should the Nobel prize be awarded to anyone who isn’t white? After all, the prizes are set up in Sweden, and Norway.

I mean, if I set up a prize in Ibadan, Nigeria where I was born, wouldn’t it be ridiculous if any white person questioned why no white person has ever gotten, say, the Látóòsà Prize?

But here’s the thing. Nigeria’s systems of knowledge have never controlled the thinking of the rest of the world. The sciences and arts for which the Nobel is awarded have been taught and practiced on all 5 continents.

As a result of centuries of colonial onslaught, hundreds of millions of people of every race have advanced education in Economics, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Physiology. Every time the Nobel is awarded, many of these people listen.

These millions all understand these prizes to be the peak of recognition in the lifelong academic disciplines in which many of us make a living.

On the other hand, it is also entirely possible that no one in Norway is seriously thinking that anyone outside the demographic that produced the prize itself, is a realistic contender.

🤔

Which is why questions such as I now ask, are chicken and egg: is it that the award is discriminatory, or is it that the assumption it should be global is itself unfounded?

Who’s right? Who’s wrong?

I am fairly certain that questions like mine are significantly unlikely to emerge from within the core of the global knowledge system.

So, there is core. There is periphery. And these are not strictly geographic categories.

So, let’s talk about hierarchy.

The world as one big stinking onion of knowledge and power, was first described in the late 1940s and 1950s by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch.

And, in 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein formalized World-Systems Theory, which categorizes global capitalism’s division of labor into the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery.

Europe & America emerged the core, through centuries of unequal exchange, by which global wealth was steadily gathered to the concentric center of the system.

Countries outside the core were reduced in power but not in value, as they became primary-resource exporting colonies, aka, perpetually developing nations but never developed countries. Aka, the periphery.

You see?

Of course it’s not a geographical attribute, except in the mind of the thinker that centers themselves and others others.

It’s a hierarchical attribute. And, like most other seemingly indelible artefacts of modern human society, a mere construct, that can equally be dismantled by thought, followed by appropriate action.

So, is core and periphery why some award and receive the Nobel prize, while others look on and clap?

Is the Nobel committee mindful that there are people right now in India, China, Nigeria, Kenya, Brazil, Equador and more, who know Nobel Prizes were awarded this week?

That must bring us to the other question- even if, by any chance, people far flung from the supposed core of human thought production are aware, are they also equally deserving?

I know for a fact that there are several people in the west who find the suggestion itself ludicrous, and at best transiently intriguing in the same way as finding a stray kitten sitting outside your window.

From the inside out, knowledge that is learnt or practiced outside the colonial core can hardly be so original as to deserve consideration for the highest prize.

Or is it?

I was born in a university. The first of few to be built outside the European core, as the sun set on colonization, in a new modern world boldly emerging from the smoke and thunder of World War II.

Ghana. Sudan. Algeria. Angola. Indonesia. Nepal. South Korea. Myanmar. Sri Lanka, had all set up their first modern universities by 1962.

In the first wave of this academic revolution was Nigeria’s University of Ibadan, since 1948. I was educated there, as were my parents before me. A sprawling campus located across west Africa’s largest city is a self contained metropolis, and in history,  second only to Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College, that being the oldest Western-style university in Sub-Saharan Africa, since 1827.

Whatever bragging entitlements I earned through a lifetime of scholarship at Ibadan was quickly dissipated after I began to be a European resident.

First of all, I faced the same interrogations repeatedly until I began to retreat from providing answers. In one instance, after a nurse in one Netherlands hospital had exercised the usual curiosity, and gotten the usual answers, she followed up with, “and what do they teach In Nigerian medical schools?”

Gulp.😳

To that, I had no answer. I had never expected the first question to be pregnant with another baby, so to speak.

But what I saw outside the walls of the hospitals, in the streets of Europe, further exhausted my ready repertoire. There were no other people who looked like me, who did what I did. Such a contrast to where I was raised.

In fact, there was such a stereotype of what black Africans in Europe did, or their backgrounds, that I’d more than once been asked by a lawyer to provide research answers about what risk boat migrants face, if their asylum applications were to be rejected: to which I replied, that, I had no experience of the subject.

It is in this world, that the Nobel prize is framed. Fortuitously, I have since moved from the Netherlands, in pursuit of whiter snow, and now live where these prizes are awarded.

I have walked the corridors of the Nobel Center there, even on days when I was the only one who looked like me in there. Wangari Maathai, Kofi Annan & Nelson Mandela’s portraits adorn the walls, alongside many others, but their Nobel prizes are not for any academic thought.

On the other hand, when Professor Wole Soyinka won the Literature Prize in 1986, he became the first black African to receive a Nobel prize for producing thought. In the 131 year history of the Nobel, Soyinka’s win is only the second ever, by a black person. The first black person was the American, W. Arthur Lewis, and he remains the only Black laureate to receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

To date, a Black scientist has never been awarded a Nobel Prize in the fields of Physiology/Medicine, Physics, or Chemistry

Soyinka was a familiar name in my household, being a professional colleague in my parents’ alma mater. In my childhood, he represented the natural idea for me, and my peers, that global excellence and recognition was in no way unusual.

You can frame my recoil at Europe’s constant questioning, in that context. But I was only questioned, not killed. Only  2 months ago, Cambridge professor Jason Arday committed suicide after 249 news articles were published in 22 days scrutinizing the validity of his academic credentials. Arday was in a high risk group for suicide, as a known autistic person, but even after he lost his life, 188 articles were still published in just 9 days, as 15 national newspapers poured concrete on his grave over his accomplishments as the youngest Black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge.

These same academic institutions have to advise the Nobel committee on what authentic knowledge production looks like. For a coterie of reasons, there’s typically no one who looks like Arday, or myself, in the places that judge these contests. And, while they are framed as merit, it is sort of like an Overton Window, where you think you are free to think, but your freedom ends at the window of cultural expectation & social norms.

More questions than answers.

It is plausible that nothing practiced at the universities of Ghana, Kenya or Nigeria by an African academic is worthy of Nobel distinction. Even the global university ranking metrics consistently rate these institutions far, far outside the core of knowledge production.

In the egg or chicken question game, maybe no original scientific or economic research has ever been produced by my father’s generation, or the professors before them. Then, if that is the answer, we who celebrate nearly a 100 years of our various alma maters need to question what it is we have spent the last almost-century studying, and decide what we need to start doing.

On the other hand, neither my colleagues nor I, not to mention my father’s generation of academics from Nigeria, have ever been accused by our peers with whom we have worked globally, of not knowing what we are doing. In fact, we are often better.

So is it only a question of who can have knowledge, or is it also a question of who has the power to decide what knowledge looks like? Or is it both questions?

And, If the Nobel institute expanded its scope of thinking to also include black Africans in African institutions, would any of us even win?

And, say, in a hypothetical scenario where we did win, what would be the implications for the global system of thought production? Or for how hierarchies of who can know, are perceived?

Deeper questions: are there structural constructs in the global system that will continue to determine for a very long time, who produces globally worthy knowledge, and who merely consumes it?

In that sense, is it possible that no individual effort will ever deconstruct a hierarchy that is preset to filter in or out who can be considered in any competition for best original thought?

What is it exactly that we need to deconstruct in the basic assumptions by which education functions?

What textbooks are we reading? Who writes them? Whose theories are taught in these textbooks? Whose theories are useful in the global marketplace? Who standardizes and assesses what is taught and practiced?

Where are the materials and equipment for learning and research manufactured? Manufacture is a very important word. It is the opposite of frank consumption.

And, how much does manufacture cost? Who can pay for manufacture? Is the market for distributing research materials and equipment structured openly, or in a closed way that limits competition?

If such a limiting structure exists, could it foreclose whether those tables can ever turn, and the consumer of research ever become the producer?

If countries that mainly consume research decide to become producers of research materials and equipment, can they free up financial resources, or is their expenditure tied to generational cycles of debt trap,

owed to the same parent institutions whose members award global prizes for best in thinking?

In Ghana for example, Education spending slipped from roughly 3.9% of GDP down toward 2.9% in recent years.

Meanwhile, Ghana's Gross Public Debt-to-GDP ratio actually exceeds 100% of government revenue (peaking around 117% in 2022).

In practice, this means Ghana’s government was technically obligated to pay more to its creditors than it collected in total taxes and grants, a mathematical impossibility that forced the immediate “crowding out” of all public sectors.

Vicious cycle. Debt obligations mount. Sovereign debt restructuring and IMF bailouts are enforced.

An overwhelming portion of national revenue is diverted away from public services like education or health, to pay domestic and external creditors.

In this scenario,  I ask, what would happen if Ghana brilliantly enacted policy to shift away from being a consumer of Europe- or American-research production?

And suddenly, what if Ghana decided to start building robust research infrastructure and institutions, like the new $5 billion Epic Center in Silicon Valley that will be the world's largest semiconductor equipment and R&D facility, speeding up next-gen AI chipmaking?

Or the €8 billion project for advanced clinical trials, medical technology innovations, and personalized medicine commenced in 2020 by the European Commission?

So, when we say periphery versus core, we are also talking about contexts like these. Who gets to produce critical mineral wealth worth $25 trillion?

The answers: Congo. Nigeria. Haiti. South Africa.

But where are the companies that extract and process these sources into global technology giants located? Silicon Valley USA.

Where are the universities that set the standards and produce the knowledge behind this extractive process? Europe and the U.S.

It is interesting to frame the development of very useful technologies as an extractive process, isn’t it?

In fact, development theorists like Walter Rodney of former British colony Guyana, argue that the Industrial Revolution is only the finer side of colonization’s dirty underbelly. Rodney’s classic 1972 book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, argues that Africa's economic position is the directly intended consequence of continued European exploitation, and not a natural misfortune, nor the result of “corruption”, nor “bad governance”.

I think, we can agree that the Nobel committee will never award Walter Rodney a prize for this original idea.

On the other hand, very few economists from Africa will ever do research that does not reward them at least financially, if not with western recognition and applause.

This itself, too, is part of my long corridor of chicken and egg questions: will academics in Africa ever be free from chasing the bag and pandering to grants, donors and governments? Do they even want to?

Or are they satisfied to have the kind of social clout I used to enjoy as a member of a professor’s family, before I moved to the colonial core, and that bubble violently blew up, up and away, floating far, far above the steeples and spires of Paris, London and Amsterdam, before ascending into oblivion beyond the temples of Einstein and Nobel in Oslo and Stockholm?

In closing, Ghana was once called the Gold Coast, but is there enough Gold in ghana to pay for a transition from mass consumption of research to original thought production?

Or, do Nigeria, or Haiti have any arsenal to disrupt the global architecture of thought production behind manufacture, and build systems and institutions that free up African thinkers to compete globally?

Do African thinkers want to compete?

Do global gatekeepers expect African thinkers?

And, if African thinkers think original thought, will global awards include ever them?

If I knew the answers, they’d have given me a Nobel prize.

Do you? 🫩

Of course, I didn’t know it. Then, I was just a little kid. Little kid who enjoyed demolishing massive mounds of fresh fufu that she’d moulded and then pounded from freshly harvested cassava. Dark green vegetable stew fried in fresh palm oil, direct from farm to table, doing one hundred things to parts of my palate I hadn’t known existed. Tingling my nostrils, raw sensations I haven’t felt again.

Now that I live in Sweden, I understand her.

Grandma was Nigerian before Nigeria was Nigerian. At the last thunderclap of the first World War, she was born in the Niger Delta, a Garden of Eden before oil and profits turned nature’s richest DNA laboratory into literal hell.

Before hell, the Delta was green. As was the countryside of Ondo State, where my Grandma later lived. Married to my Yoruba grandfather, she raised 5 children here, in these green hills, forested as far as the eye could see. Elephants were there. I never saw them, but my late grandfather’s was named Big Elephant Hunter. Green hills, dark forests, a magical time before capitalism killed nature.

Now as I experience the rich countryside of Sweden, I am drawn back into Grandma’s cozy, slow paced, rich green countryside.

Everything in Sweden reminds me. Grandma, who never contemplated Sweden, did live in Kwale, and Sapele, even Agbor, and all the way through the southeast and across the southwest, Ilesha, Ibadan, Lagos, then all the way up to Lokoja, Abuja, Kaduna in the North. Polyglot before the word, she spoke 6 languages. including English. Polymath before it was special, multitasker and multiprenuer, and face of independent feminism before any textbook taught it. Smart as a whip, neat as a pin, always impeccable in manner and dress, wholly Nigerian yet Swedish before I knew what that was.

I knew her kitchen, first of all.

Not what we call kitchen, nowadays. Not what my friend in one of these expensive apartments in Big Lagos keeps complaining about - the new ‘kitchen islands’, where you cook right in the middle of your living space. Modern, they say.

But, Grandma had an outhouse. An entire separate cooking arena, industrial in scope, if not in machinery. The first chimney I ever saw, before that word itself entered my vocab, was there. No chimneys to see in my parts of Ibadan or Lagos, but decades later, when I saw chimneys in rural Netherlands, I was like, oh! a chimney!

The kitchen outhouse was a dark, smoky-sweet space, where Grandma bent over a giant steel cauldron, over there in the fireplace, at the right corner. Open hearth built from clay, charred with years of burning freshly cut firewood, cut with an axe, by herself, in the back of her courtyard. Heaven’s aroma, scent of burning forest-fresh wood mixed with atarodo and epo pupa, to design one of those life transforming stews only a Delta grandma can craft. Soups that are nowadays likely extinct, to this microwave generation of packed and processed 10 minute meals.

Oh! the waft and weave of cuisine from that outhouse, all the way across the courtyard, on the large hand-painted steel trays she placed her ceramic plates and bowls in, as she brought the food in to the living room, one tray at a time, for 3 little children, sometimes, 5, even more, depending on time of year and who was visiting. Here in the bagarstuga in my Swedish village, every smell still takes me back to Grandma’s outhouse. “That’s Grandma”, i think to myself, when I observe Sweden’s centuries old cooking architecture, brick upon brick. I may have been the first black person to make tunnbröd in a Swedish open hearth, but the skills were there whenever Grandma allowed me watch her make magic, long long ago, in her outhouse kitchen.

And her latrine. Yes, latrine. In those days, I didn’t like it very much. But, then, it was a much better idea than shitting in the bush like many people did. So, Grandma built another outhouse, in a row of one bathroom house and two toilet houses. One toilet for her, the other for her late husband’s family, who lived in the next compound. Because pit latrines conflicted with the vitreous china WC’s from Armitage Shanks that were normal back in Ibadan, I developed the habit of constipation. Day after day spent avoiding being alone in the stillness of the grey concrete latrine outhouse, with a window in one wall, a hole in the floor, and a wooden seat cover.

I imagined crocodiles. snakes. anything, to bite my little yansh. And, when I did make it in there, 2 days after mentally repressing nature, there were no animals in the latrine. Not even a fly, or a cockroach. Grandma, with the help of her houseboy, kept the place as clean as if it were a hospital. My mental crocodiles would not have stood a chance against grandma’s daily palm brooms, water and disinfectants.

Nowadays, when I pass through Swedish countryside, I see these outhouses. I probably understand them better than I should. When I’m told the environmental argument for less water waste, and the health argument for better spinal posture, I realize what Grandma was showing us, decades ago.

Next to Grandma’s latrine was the bathroom. Unlike the latrine, there was no hesitation here. Concrete walls, screeded in cement spackle, were lined with a wooden shelf of some fresh, some perfumed skincare products.

Aromatherapy before that became a word.

From her cauldron in the kitchen outhouse, Grandma fetched a metal pail full of hot, hot boiling water. To my Ibadan brain, this bath water was far, far too hot. But I guess I didn’t yet understand winter. Okay, not winter as in Sweden, but here in this mountainous village, surrounded by hilly green forests all the way, our Decembers were cold as fuck. The boiling hot water in grandma’s heavy forged iron pail quickly lost 20 degrees of heat as she swung it on her way through the chilly courtyard. She dropped it in the bathroom, and gave me a quick stare that meant, stop playing, get to it.

Often, it was me and my little brother, showering together, but other times, I was last to get up, so alone in the bathhouse. The first scoop of hot water was careful, gingerly, but after a few more timid attempts, I had begun to enjoy the searing cascades. The bathroom gradually filled with steam so that I could hardly see the door anymore. So i turned and stared through the tiny open window, and watched what the villagers were doing, even though they couldn’t see me.

The hot water was so, so clean, it reflected the room, like a silver mirror, as if I could watch myself shining on my own skin. I lathered lazily and luxuriously with soft, freshly made black soap, although, on the shelf, there was also the perfumed soap from Avon which grandma’s American daughter in law had sent. Nowadays, west Africans who live in Europe desperately depend on shop-bought Dudu Osun, to keep our delicate tropical skin alive in the harsh climate, but my black soap was made by hand, and far, far superior.

The loofah was from a tree at the side of our street. But, only yesterday, my favorite retailer in this Swedish village cajoled me to buy a loofah. He said it was a new age revelation, and told me all the benefits this loofah would bring to free my skin from the mediocrity of capitalist beauty standards. I wanted to say “grandma’s loofah was free, straight from the tree”, instead I simply paid the 50 krone, to enjoy once again what I once felt for free, in grandma’s massive outdoor bathroom.

Then, the short walk from that warm, steam drenched bathroom, across the harmattan frigid air of grandmas courtyard was such a shock, that I ran quickly, into the warm safety of the main house. Nowadays in Sweden, we pay for sauna and spa therapy. You get steamed up in the sauna, then jump right into a cold river, or a pool, or dunk ice cold water from a bucket. Spa shock is supposed to do wonders for the skin, and endocrine, and cardiovascular systems, they say. But Grandma was the first to give me outdoor sauna and spa. Decades later, my skin is aglow because it had an early start with the world’s best grandma.

And, Grandma’s main house wasn’t fancy, but I daresay it may have been the best house. A long hallway, open on both ends, except for light wooden frames with mosquito nets. Airflow was abundant, as was the lighting. Light and space may be be modern architecture concepts, but grandma already did it. In the 8 rooms on either side of this hallway, the windows were wood, with slits through which I watched the neighbors without being watched back. And, the neighbors did bad things. Bad things, which I'm not allowed to say. Things so bad, that even when they shut their own windows and I could no longer see them, I definitely could hear all their rather awkward noises. These village people never did anything quietly. And, as for the actual doings, they were often preceded with meticulous, loud arguments, even actual physical fights, before the two lovers disappeared into their rooms and settled the drama in a more passionate kind of wrestling, that left them needing to open those windows again.

All this I have understood by keeping my nose to the wooden panes, but only for fresh air, I assure you.

At night, the wooden windows were shut. The main entrance and exit foods to the long hallway, which were never closed during the day, were shut tightly now. In the still of the night, there was more drama, but of an eerie kind, as faceless thugs from rival parties tended to maraud, house to house, stoking up political tension. It was the bad old days of Nigeria's wild, wild west.

Now that I think about it, I think Grandma may have qualified to be upper class, at least in the view of those next door neighbors, but maybe we we're just an ordinary family with an extraordinary grandmother? My own parents were bloody civil servants still hustling far away in the big city, and no one in my family had a big bank account, except of course you count grandma’s big heart, and the many millions of hugs and kisses she gave me.

So, grandma is in heaven now. Heaven, not the one with winged angels in flight, but a green forested, magical homeland where grandma’s grandma, and all my other relatives still watch over me, no matter where I am, Sweden or Nigeria, hoping I remember them, and slowly grow into someone just as wonderful as Grandma was.

I’m working on it.

Or is it?

Shall we fight laziness? Or support?

What we really have to do, is outgrow simplistic binaries. Looking at things as definitely this or that.

Not good.

And, when we add to that, a moral overtone, such as, this is bad, therefore we punish, and that is good, therefore we support, it gets even more dangerous.

Moral binaries. You know what comes from simplistic moral binaries? Ableism.

Now if you’ve never contemplated that word, shame on you, but quick, get a dictionary and sit with me.

Ableism is when you look down on someone and decide you’re better, but the attribute you’re judging them for, is something they can’t control. You see?

Okay. Let’s talk Medical Laziness.

Once upon a time, as a supercute little boy in the superlarge city of Ibadan - if you don’t know where that is, shame on you - but as I was saying, when I was little, “lazy” was a scary word.

Because I never wanted to feel the horror of being labeled lazy by powerful people, such as teachers, or mommy, or daddeee, I worked superhard.

I became the best boy in the world.

You think that’s good? Well, now that I’m old, I suffer. I suffer from overdoings. I suffer from lack of boundaries. People pleasing. Never giving myself enough rest. Always putting “humanity” above myself.

But you see, I’m not Jesus. This is sooo not a practical way to be, as a mere mortal.

If only I’d been allowed to be a child, instead of a perfect little person, I’d be healthier now.

So let’s talk about all the little people, and some of the bigger people around you, whom you may have labeled lazy?

There is lazy. What the people in my village call aláìnínkanṣe.

What we do want to be careful about is dumping labels like “couch potato!” or “unmotivated!” or “lazy”, before we understand why people are the way they are.

I am learning, that 60% of the people we label lazy, are actually suffering deeply, from a medical condition.

Actually, several medical conditions.

In these conditions, “lazy” is not something they are “doing”. It is something they are going through.

Maybe time for we listen, we don’t judge, if you know what I mean? 🤓

For example, ADHD?

If you don’t know what that means, shame on you.

Anyway 🙄. Wish we knew about ADHD when I was a little boy in school. Many of the kids at the literal back of the class could have been treated better.

But we called them names. 😕

An ADHD person knows what to do, but can’t do it.

They don’t benefit from being advised.

They don’t benefit from being criticized.

They are like single engine planes.

They need support, not more words.

Instead of heckling an ADHD person to complete that task, sit with them and work through it with them. There’s a button in their brain that controls something neuroscientists call Executive Function.

Maybe, you and I can take “doing” for granted because we are able to do. ADHD people? They can’t “do”. Their Executive Function button is missing. See?

This looking down on “lazy” people, and calling them names, that is Ableism.

Opposite of ableism? Empathy.

Other medical conditions can mimic ADHD.

For example, traumatic brain injury. When I was a medical student, a bang on the head was an unrelatable, distant theory. Now that I’ve personally managed people dear to me whose lives have been affected by a severe head bang, I have learned empathy for the ways they become “lazy”.

In medical school, we were taught the surgical sequelae of head injury. I don’t remember if the changes in their personality were emphasized? 🤔

In my current experience, personality changes are the more difficult part. What do they need? Support.

In closing, remember every time I wrote “shame on you” in this post?

That was ableism.

And, I’m sorry. 😞

No one should feel ashamed for not being a “doer”. There are people who simply can’t do. Not because they are “lazy”.

But, because their brains are wired to not execute tasks. And to power down once they start to become aware of tasks. That’s why making them more aware of urgency, doesn’t help. Rather, it cripples.

🤔

Words won’t help these “lazy” people. Support will. And support starts with empathy. Did you learn something new today? Tell us in the comments. ✍🏽

Someone who needs to feel seen might be reading.

We mustn’t always join things that are already started by others.

We can also start things.

Others and us don’t always have the same historical lived experiences or current situation and future priorities. Or overall perspectives on geopolitics. Or strengths. Or weaknesses.

Every time we join one of these we end up at the back of the class. Because the structure of the world, how it works, already puts Africa at the back of the class.

And none of these organizations, from BRICS to WTO, to UN and others, are invested in challenging or changing the world order.

They are themselves, the world order.

I’ve written more extensively, elsewhere, why Africa must consider the 3rd way, its own self led alternative to BRICS.

Yes, I know this is way over the heads of most current African leaders, not the least the Nigerian leadership. It is particularly shameful that Nigeria is banging on the door, from the back of the room where BRICS has relegated Africa’s most important economy.

That in itself is the lesson.

So many internal fundamentals to be corrected before something like BRICS can be useful for Africa.

AfCFTA for instance. Where’s that? How’s that going? Is that still a neocolonial project with European and Chinese puppet masters and African implementers? Or does Africa really have control of this massive idea and it’s unparalleled potential to disrupt the global architecture?

If AfCFTA remains a paper tiger, BRICS can never work for Africa. It can only work against us, like every other neocolonial palliative before.

The African Union for instance. How’s that going?

Or the African Development Bank - are these still institutions where former colonizers presently hold majority stakes, and even attend our meetings?

As long as our internal status quo is unbroken, no foreign idea, not even BRICS, can rescue Africa.

And the AES? How’s that going?

The Alliance of Sahel States was supposed to be a teachable moment for the rest of Africa. Instead, it exposed how deeply France is embedded, not only in “francophone” Africa, but all the way to Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria.

As long as AES remain outsiders to ECOWAS, a million BRICS can never rescue Africa from global economic servitude.

As we speak, South Africa is unraveling deeper and deeper into the chasmic vortices of violent Afrophobic xenophobia.

The state itself won’t stop it, because the state and the afrophobes are on the same team.

Other African nations whose citizens are being killed, and forcefully exiled, won’t do anything because the African Union and its member states are a shadow of themselves.

As long as this internal contradiction persists, nothing BRICS can promise will overturn Africa’s own unwillingness to take charge of itself.

BRICS is against the colonizer class. But for you to be against anything, you first have to be for yourself.

Are we for ourselves? Is Africa for Africa?

Or are we still answering to just about any hunter’s whistle in the global forest?

Africa needs to confront its internal contradictions and lack of preparedness, then come to the negotiating table with BRICS, or any other organization, with a stronger position.

Until then, it’s a farce.

Pipe dream.

A naked dance in the public square at midnight.

Another talk shop that will end up irresponsibly transmitting the burden of economic underdevelopment and political inferiority to one more African generation.

For all its hype, BRICS will end up on the photo wall of history, an inert non-contributor, like every other talk shop before it.

Unless we ask root questions.

Unless we challenge structures, structures that have determined outcomes for 400 years.

The stakes are set.

We are not ready.

BRICS is not for us.

Move on.

Like them, and I would grow up to become a doctor.

On one of those long lecture-hall afternoons, I heard the word “autism.” Our pediatrics professor, a woman with curly, speckled hair and thick goggles, described it as a spectrum. It sounded rare, even abstract.

Fast forward, I’ve been a doctor for a quarter of a century. My next-door neighbor, who waves from the balcony every time I come home, is autistic. Last year, family from my home church invited me to meet their child. Happy, playful, autistic. And, my own nephew has taught me more about my childhood self than I ever realized, through his own neurodivergence.

But, if empathy is built only on proximity, then it is a fragile, privileged thing. In our Yoruba culture, we are raised to ‘feel what another feels’. Àánú, or ìmọ̀lára, are part of ìwà rere, basic good character. Had I met Jason Arday as a young medical student, I might not yet have understood his autism, but I’d have at least been considerate.

In Clapham, the London borough where Jason Arday grew up, almost no Black child imagines a future as a doctor, let alone a professor. Quietly and systematically, teachers and advisers steer them toward retail, security work, delivery driving, sport and entertainment.

Ibadan, the Nigerian city where I grew up, is larger than London. Modest, middle-class upbringing, but on every side, I was surrounded by aspiration. The biggest ophthalmologist in the city was our neighbor to the left. The Chief Medical Director was our front neighbor. An Emeritus Professor of Education was to the right, and he was in fact a distant cousin of my mum. Next to his house, a husband-and-wife professor couple. One household even held a dynasty of them: grandfather, father, grandchildren, all professors in medicine.

It wasn’t until I left Nigeria — twenty-five years across twenty-five countries, fifteen of them in the Netherlands and Sweden — that I understood how rare my ordinary childhood was.

One Allegation, Cleared Twice

By the time the plagiarism allegations against Arday became public, they had already been investigated. Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded Arday his PhD in 2015, examined the original allegations and found not plagiarism but citation defects in his literature review. “Honest and reasonable error,” LJMU concluded.

In June 2025, when the debate flared up a 2^nd time, LJMU responded publicly: a confidential procedure had already been conducted, and Professor Arday’s PhD still stood.

As far as citations of other literature, Arday himself told The Times that early in his academic career he had relied heavily on mimicry to make interpretative sense of material. This itself is an autistic trait, this different way of processing information. Backing this, the LJMU admitted in their findings that Arday’s work was original, but any citation errors were “compounded by inadequate supervision, given his learning disabilities.”

Still, Arday accepted responsibility for those early mistakes, but denied dishonesty.

When the allegations resurfaced, Cambridge had already acknowledged the allegations were disproven. Weeks of media pressure, and possibly internal politics, forced a late reversal. Cambridge’s redecision & second investigation cost Arday his faith in the institution, and triggered his resignation, and withdrawal from public life.

Mirrors a hazardous trend. Former Harvard president, Professor Claudine Gay, was also held up as a shining example, but abandoned & left vulnerable once there was an attack.

In fact, plagiarism allegations are levelled more than twice as often against Black academics as against their peers. This was published in a 2021 survey of 2,000 students across 98 universities, by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse/Kaplan.

World-leading expert in autism, Simon Baron-Cohen, had issued a public warning that he considered Arday at risk of suicide. Baron-Cohen’s concern was rooted in his own 2014 research, since widely replicated, finding that one in four autistic people has planned or attempted suicide.

Instead, the media hounding didn’t just continue, it increased.

Arday’s downward mental health spiral ended in his sudden death on August 14, 2026.

Media as Weapon of Terror

249 articles blazed across UK media in 22 days.

For comparison, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal where Peter Mandelson leaked sensitive government received 166 articles.

Just two newspaper articles were ever published about Cambridge professor William O’Reilly who was found guilty — not merely accused — of actual plagiarism in 2023.

From plagiarism allegations, the feeding frenzy morphed into full character assassination, disputes over Arday’s moral integrity, and a grand inquisition into his childhood.

“In a meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard would approach 0%.”

This Hitler-styled eugenist fallacy is attributed to Nathan Cofnas.

The post-doctoral researcher was fired from Cambridge’s Emmanual College, but later hired by Ghent University, despite protests by staff and students. Spurned, he believed that if he couldn’t become a Cambridge professor, no black person should.

It was Cofnas who fired off the media allegations against Arday.

Karen Attiah, formerly Global Opinions editor at The Washington Post, has described what happened as a digital terror campaign: algorithms, she argues, are a global demonstration of power, sending a fast, unmistakable warning to successful Black people in white institutions everywhere: don’t aim too high.

Nina Jankowicz, who was herself the target of a violent harassment campaign after being appointed to a US government disinformation board, says terror campaigns succeed at manufacturing self-censorship, unless institutions build real support structures: monitoring threats to protect people, not just reputations; and providing real physical and mental-health support to those under attack.

What Can You Do?

Professor Jason Arday is survived by his wife, Debbie-Ann McKenzie, their two children, Taylah and Noah; his mother, Gifty, a mental health nurse; his father, a chef; and three brothers. Their joint statement called him an amazing father, partner, brother, uncle, and son.

In the time since we lost Professor Arday, I’ve written to a fellow board member who is also an academic colleague at Ghent University, to ask what her administration planned to do about Nathan Cofnas.

Days later, Ghent has announced Cofnas’ suspension.

I’ve also written to Professor Arday’s family. In a short email, I told them how their husband, brother and son was an inspiration for children around the world. They have replied with thanks. Their email is available on request.

A protective legislation that would limit how many articles can be published about an individual in a specific timeframe is proposed to be called Arday’s Law.

A demand for public inquiry had been sent to the UK government.

Change.org registered over 20,000 official complaints in 48 hours, and over 150,000 emails have been filed to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). You too can send a formal complaint.

If you feel triggered by the media coverage of Jason Arday, or are at mental health risk, please call the toll-free emergency number 112.

For those in Nigeria, please use these resources:

Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative — MANI

• Phone: 0809 111 6264 or 0811 168 0686

• Email: info@mentallyaware.org

• Website: mentallyaware.org⁠

SURPIN — Suicide Research and Prevention Initiative

• 24-hour toll-free hotline: 0800 078 7746

• Email: surpinng@gmail.com

• Website: surpinng.com⁠

Whatever you do, you can decline to join in, when attacks like these recur.

Learn about autism. Also about ableism. Question your understanding of people, in general.

Did you know, people with autism ‘mask’? This means they suppress their natural autistic traits so they can fit into social expectations. But, masking requires massive amounts of energy, and causes mental and physical exhaustion. Another way autistic people ‘fit in’ is mimicry: copy pasting what they see others do, just to survive in social settings.

Be kind. Advocate for others, especially if they can’t advocate effectively for themselves. Understand group interest, in the way these media and attackers also do. Don’t be race naïve.

Our choices reflect in policies and politics, such as how we can stop the hemorrhage of educated talent that continues to surge abroad, while health systems stall in our own countries.

As John Stuart Mill told his students at St Andrews College in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

After 100s of years of geopolitical power play by institutions like Cambridge, men like Nathan Cofnas, and the global network of sponsors they represent, a new generation must act more intentionally, so we can all be free to be whoever we want to be, and develop together, in our own best interests.

Resources

Where is the research into Black autism and ADHD?

Autism in Black

Color of Autism Foundation

Academic integrity issues are not race neutral

Black academics more than twice as likely to be alleged of plagiarism

Understanding ableism and negative reactions to disability

Ableism and disablism

Ableism 101

This will not be because we become more moral. It’s not a moral issue at all.

It will be that economic and market systems evolve, in such innovative ways, that it is simply no longer profitable to waste public finances.

There will be such a competitive, life-or-death kind of new business ecosystem that will leave absolutely no room for any kind of waste.

It will not be an ethical revolution at all: it will simply be the only way.

Some of this may have to do with technology: as #artificialintelligence transitions to a fully independent role in governance and economic control, there will simply be no room for numbers that do not add up.

The other factor will be that the present practice of “foreign aid” and dependency based financing will disappear.

Again, not because we become more intelligent or suddenly radical.

It will be that there’s simply no more money, candidly, to give away. Countries who now position themselves as “western saviors” will be busy saving their own people.

This transition is already ongoing, with the brutal amputation of USAID, and several donor countries reducing aid.

We will go from drip-drip-drop to a stunning silence, and the hand me down tap will dry up forever.

This will happen in a decade, maybe more.

In places like Africa for example, where much capital lies redundant, crowded out by the donor-industrial-complex … will we finally put our feet down, develop our own infrastructure, and seed our own ventures?

Will MSMEs lead? Or will we still be beholden to global corporations?

Will AfCFTA innovate an African-led Industrial Revolution? Or will the world’s biggest trade zone be relegated to imports and consumption?

We are sitting on unused resources, and entertaining too many fiscal loopholes for waste and corrupt misuse of public finances: and the consequences are internecine conflicts, decrepit infrastructure, crises in education, and #healthsystems that are not yet ready for the next wave of pandemic panic.

We will likely miss the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

In their place, Dr Olusoji Adeyi has recently suggested Regional Development Goals.

We need at least an extra decade.

Health, education, water, and clean energy already demand over £158 billion in annual capital.

Massive infrastructure deficits require up to £134 billion annually. Infrastructure is a critical non-health determinant of health systems.

Meanwhile, African pension funds hold assets worth an estimated £369 billion and are projected to grow to over £5 trillion by 2050.

Sovereign wealth funds are currently estimated at between £95 and £104 billion.

Remittances to Africa reached £71 billion by 2022, and exceed both foreign direct investment (FDI) and official development assistance (ODA).

Will Africa continue, cap in hand to global capital, or will we crack the code ?

I first published this article in March 2026.

It prefaces another one just published this week, that explains the ‘how’ of African capital.

You can read that here: Politics Is Dead

See example:

Politics has no role to play in, and is not the answer, to, Nigeria’s development.

I say that clearly and categorically, and it can be challenged by those who find it a shocking statement.

Politics will not solve Nigeria’s problems.

Not at scale, anyway.

You can change leaders and do elections all we want.

We are just wasting time: generations will live and die, and Nigeria will sink further into this directionless, multidimensional, extreme poverty.

The days are gone when politics could have been the answer.

Maybe the 60s & 70s? The morass is now so multifaceted, so insidious and so ubiquitous, that we lack the political culture and capital to intervene.

It’s far, far too late.

The one thing that can transform Nigeria developmentally, is direct economic change.

No political actors required.

The people will have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.

Here’s what we must do.

Multiply or scale businesses.

Two types of business: big business and Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs).

Core example of big business is Dangote. The billionaire example.

There are several other Nigerian billionaires but he’s the one in the news. Nigeria needs to multiply Dangote in 6 places. Dangote is metaphor.

Every geopolitical zone needs one Dangote. That billionaire, or even, a conglomerate of billionaires, since we are not short of them, must focus their investments on building the local economy of their region.

At this moment, all Nigeria’s billionaires and elites are neocolonial crony capitalists. Their profits build private accounts and add to economies in Europe, America and the Middle East. These Nigerian billionaires are not investing for the sake of Nigeria. They may have a Nigerian footprint but their profits are banked in the colonial core, serving our colonizers and building wealth for others.

Not for Nigerians. We just get the crumbs.

But, do you know why South Africa is the largest economy? Because South African billionaires invest in South African business.

Now to be fair, they are not more patriotic than Nigerians. But, it works in their favor because they own that economy, so whatever they invest is eventually their own.

Nigerian billionaires do not own Nigeria’s economy. No incentive for them to invest in what is not theirs. South African billionaires are mostly white. The South African economy is still 85 percent white owned. Even when they move their capital to Europe and America, like Elon Musk, it’s still white ownership.

Though Elon Musk is a particularly poor example because ideologically he doesn’t consider himself African at all and doesn’t actually invest in South Africa itself, in fact, is presently at war with his home government.

The point is, the whiteness of those billionaires is an important point to understand their incentive in exploiting South Africa’s natural wealth. They build a closed economy that only a 5-percenter racial hegemon have control over.

Yet, most black South Africans remain poor. Still, the white led investment in south Africa’s economy counts towards South Africa’s economic rating. Egypt has a similar story, but these are Arab billionaires, and the 2nd largest African economy.

Like them, Nigeria’s billionaires, being as a group, the only black billionaires on the continent, must discover the Nigerian economy for themselves and turn inwards.

Time up for remaining in business only as neocolonial cronies and tools of Nigerian underdevelopment.

Nigeria needs one Dangote, or a conglomerate of billionaires like him, to focus on developing each of our six geopolitical zones.

Dangote himself needs to decide whether he wants to focus on the Lagos or south west zone, where he currently dominates, or move to the north west where he’s originally from, and replicate what he’s done, but this time with a geopolitical objective.

The same must happen in South east, south south, north central and north east.

Investments can be made in any and every sector directly related to actual development.

Agriculture. Infrastructure. Energy. Health. Education.

Imagine if instead of one American themed university where children of the er, elite, are prepared for export to the global market, billionaire Atiku had a Nigeria focused university in his north east home zone, where there’d a direct pipeline from the curriculum to that region’s economic opportunities?

More interesting - Nigeria’s highest out of school rates are in that region.

Make it make sense.

But neocolonial crony capitalism will not allow us to do for ourselves, as Malcolm X famously taught.

Imagine if Otedola or Adenuga created a southwest economic model. Lagos is already a captive market. Think for me.

Or, if Arthur Eze or Innoson created an energy or tech sector in the already entrepreneur advanced, manufacturing ready south east.

Jim Ovia and Tony Elumelu are from Delta. Think for me. The possibilities.

Even if the best known billionaires from North central mostly made their money from “politics”, still, think for me. North east is sitting on trillions of naira worth in steel production, hydro electric power and agriculture.

Think for me.

Stop. Don’t tell me, “but government won’t allow them”.

That’s the problem. What is the solution?

Nigeria has abundant billionaires. Only God knows what they’re doing with their money. Probably sitting in one corner complaining, while praying to God for solutions and patronizing politicians for crony access.

That’s why analysts say Nigeria has no true elites, because the level of thinking of our rich people is no different from our poor people.

We are all exactly poor in spirit, empty in our souls, void of revolutionary ideology, with no scalable solutions to generations of bottom barrel survivalism.

No country on earth ever developed because of its politicians.

Check history. America had its Roosevelts & Vanderbilts.

None of that wealth was ethical. It was all stolen and exploited, mostly from black bodies, but also from their lower classes.

But still, they built something in America.

Not JFK, nor Jefferson, nor any good president.

Industrialists built America.

Europe had its Rothschilds, Grosvenors, Agnellis.

Notorious they may have been, but their money is still making money for the larger economy, today, and Europe is built around that industrialization.

Ambani, Lee (Samsung), Yiming (Tiktok) and several more Asian Tigers define Asia and the world as we know it.

These are not politicians, but they build industries that produce today’s global corporations. The so-called Industrial Revolutions, all 4, are creditable not to any political class, but to men and women like these.

Their taxes go to government. That’s how politics can benefit directly from business and industrial development.

Nigeria and Africans must stop looking to any politicians or elections.

A time should come very soon when politics is so mundane and of such little interest that it no longer attracts heated competition, but is left to men and women who truly have a calling.

Not lackeys or charlatans, not small minds, or mediocre men, but true politicians who want to build the sorts of social and generational cultures and structures politicians should be genuinely responsible for.

As for our national development and the economy in particular, it is in our own hands. We the people. And, our billionaire class.

Let the billionaire class stop being cronies, go to work and unlock the engines of the economy we want.

Free up capital for the small and medium scale entrepreneurs to run wild and free.

Seed our communities with scalable investments at household level.

We will empower ourselves. No one is coming to save us. Neither God nor man. We must look away from politics, look to business, and learn decolonial, self-interested, geopolitically informed, anti-capitalist, pro African, grassroots economic thinking.

And, scale that, till all 200 million of us have a hand in our national cake, whether baking or eating, and no one is left behind.

This has happened every 4 years, since nearly 100 years. Why??

Africans who love football think we are the biggest followers & knowers of the game, but like everything else on earth, football is influenced by race, geopolitics, capitalism and neocolonialism.

“More questions”

1. Why does Africa import coaches and export footballers?

Is it different from why we import medicines, and export doctors?

Or, why we import chocolate, and export cocoa?

How long will we continue to manage our football, (and economies), this way?

2. Why are European teams full of black players?

Blacks in Europe’s general population are not even up to 5 percent: yet, somehow, a whopping 21 of France’s 26 players are black.

England has 15 black players. The Netherlands has 14.

Belgium & Germany have 9 black players each.

Even in the host nation, black people are more in the football team, than in the US general population.

Why? No easy answers please. I’m looking for table-scattering answers.

3. Why do African footballers play so well, in terms of passion and talent, yet never win the World Cup?

Is this some kind of oyinbo juju? Are oyinbos simply superior?

All 3 questions asked, let’s play a game. Let’s call it the 3 Laws of Football.

Let’s go.

These are neither good nor bad. Take it as context analysis.

“Mind over Matter”

The technical intricacies & military violence by which Africa was colonized since the 16th century, were supported by a psychological, cultural factor.

That is, the stark difference between the cold, calculating, ruthless, exploitative mindset of our strange visitors, and Africa’s own warmth, openness and generally relaxed world view.

Typical football fans may say “we don’t care! We just want to enjoy the game!”

But the evidence will show that our understanding of international football, is also playing out in our politics, our economies and our fate as Africans in the world.

While we focus on our enjoyment of the tournament, the razzle dazzle of the game, these Europeans still look at us with the same hawk eyed, soulless, mathematical calculation with which they first landed on the shores of the Niger Delta 600 years ago.

African teams like Senegal or Congo may win our hearts, and prove physical prowess, but Africa must learn to play international football as a mind game.

On top of our usual passion and physical strength, we need an ideological, tactical, psychological mindset.

Only the most mentally ruthless win the World Cup.

“Money, money, money!”

The other thing we need is financing.

Our own money, not FIFA grants. The same way we should stop depending on receiving foreign aid to develop our health sectors, or united nations programs to develop our education, or world bank loans for our agriculture and infrastructure.

Hire home grown coaches. Pay them. Pay players, and develop our economies and enough to end brain drain.

Make sports an economic sector, like oil and gas, or technology.

Forget accidental team building and magical hopes for globally competitive outcomes at every world cup. Finance year-round grassroots sport development in every local community.

Let investors invest in sustainable sports sector development that can yield stable, 4 yearly returns.

“History”

There was no African team at the inaugural world cup in 1930.

For 40 years, no African country was allowed at the world cup. Despite consistent applications from many newly independent African countries, FIFA allocated only one place to three continents: Asia, Oceania & Africa.

As we approach the 100^th year of the World Cup, 10 African teams have been allowed for the first time.

If we choose to participate in something that was clearly designed without us in mind, then, we must stop playing as if it’s our system, and start to learn why for a century only the makers of that system are still winning the world cup.

“The Global Game”

The answers are not different from why the global economy develops some countries while impoverishing others. You either believe poverty is a moral flaw, or “corruption” is a neat answer, or you begin to consider that maybe capitalism and neocolonialism are working the way they were designed?

Likewise, is Africa’s performance at the World Cup a result of our physical inferiority, or lack of talent?

Or, are we just dancing at a party we were invited to without first learning the dance?

But first, we have to ditch the emotional game. The hustle and flurry that starts powerfully but dissipates before each match is over.

We must stop consoling ourselves every time: “at least we played well!”

We must decide that international football plays to a different set of rules than our rofo-rofo soccer skirmishes on the dusty street sides of Lagos, Dakar or Kinshasa.

International football has never been about talent, passion or strength

If it was, Congo would’ve held on to its 1-0 lead, maybe even doubled that in the 2^nd half, maybe sent England packing.

Instead of blowing its 2-0 lead, then conceding 3-2 in the final minutes, Senegal would have qualified against Belgium.

But the colonizer eventually takes the game,

Like their take our resources.

Europe’s economies depend on Africa’s cobalt, uranium and many more materials, even as Europe’s teams depend on Africa’s footballers. And, they will keep developing at our expense, while we play for crumbs, as long as we keep playing the global game with local mindsets.

What European teams are looking at when they play on the global pitch is different from what African teams are looking at. That’s why no matter how “strong” we are, they win.

For 600 years, it’s always been mind games between them and us.

Or tell me, what do you think?

‪

instead of the word ‘God’,

I have increasingly said ‘Orí’, in thought & casual conversation,

because,

unlike most colonized peoples, I increasingly realize that the events of my unfolding life are not attributable to some external, distant, spatially unrelatable separate entity, but are actual direct, continuous consequences of specific agreements I originally entered into with myself.

Agreements made with self before birth are all inscribed and installed into a premortal, preconscious program called Orí, that runs in perpetuity, till I complete the human phase of my course, and return to source.

This way of seeing myself & the world is not only completely opposite to the colonial Christian & Islamic narrative,

it is also completely necessary for an African mind to free itself from the yoke of being at the back of the global class, acquire ideology in the service of self, and spring into a fully lived human condition.

⚫️

Africans are the only people on earth who interpret ourselves through the cultural and religious lenses of others;

even worse, those others being our colonizers;

even worse, colonization being the most prolonged violence ever inflicted by any set of humans against another,

while its lifelong mental, social, physical, spiritual, economic and political panpathology still continue to be both ununderstood and unresolved,

while its afflictors and afflicted remain entangled forever in a bizarre, morbid, eternal zombie dance, in which one party has to be violently dedeveloped for the other to continue gallivanting and galloping in the guise of an unearned, stolen and arrogantly propagandized, presumptuous industrialization.

⚫️

The role of spirituality & religion in all these is to determine the limits of human imagination and personal agency.

And, wherever imagination goes, there goes development, and industrialization.

And so, it is not for nothing, that the first thing colonizers did before active military invasion, political administration and economic control,

was a social reengineering that began by missionary work, information gathering and gaining converts among Africans, who could act as entry points to break down culture & collective action from within,

even before the first bullet was fired,

before the first minerals were mined,

and before the first ships were loaded with the human and material resources by which the west continues to industrialize while actively dedeveloping Africa.

⚫️

When your highest self is made in the image of your colonizer, your developing self will never develop past colonization.

Reset.

Emotional unintelligence, and the lack thereof, is a global palaver.

It’s why America falls to Donald Trump, why Europe distracts itself with immigration, why South Africans are xenophobic.

Intelligence is not one thing. Its several, some studies say there are at least 7 intelligences? Many of us were failed by the school system, which labeled certain kids as intelligent, and others as not. The truth is, some kids are fish, others are frogs, others are cats. Yet we are all required to climb the same tree. The metric for exams is how well fish, frogs and cats can climb trees. Education itself, needs a reboot.

But, education cannot solve this problem.

Aren’t we all educated? Even with Phds? Still, emotional intelligence has to be socially and culturally learnt. I can be honest with you - I don’t have the answer. I can only ask the right questions.

We all need emotional intelligence for example, in our personal relationships. Many relationships fail, because both partners are operating at different levels of emotional intelligence. It’s like mixing old cloth and new cloth: there might be a tear, no?

We all need emotional intelligence, at work. Though I think, managers need it more than other employees. Why? because, most workplace abuse is from top to bottom.

We all need emotional intelligence in our politics.

Why, despite the sad fact that we are suffering tremendously under our governments, do we not take sensible steps to collectively course-correct? Because our individual, ethnic and religious sentiments overrule our actual needs.

So, maybe it is time to talk about religion?

Religion is a blunter of intelligence.

And of emotional intelligence, in particular.

Maybe not all religion? Afterall, some religious societies like ancient Mali or the Roman Empire can show actual civilization results. But, we must also confront this other truth: there is always more than one form of a particular religion. The Christianity and Islam dumped on colonized countries, are not of the same ideological refinement as the originals. Not to mention, the very nature of colonization always requires opposite results between colonizer and colonized.

Hence, the visible result of religion in colonized countries, is a dumbing down of the mind.

Religious people cannot conclusively process emotional intelligence. They have inbuilt roadblocks that constantly stand in their way when they think. Today I was talking to a er, sister in the Lord, ahum, about her abusive father. Her quick retort was that she has adopted God as her father. My old self would have reacted, but my new self, the more emotionally intelligent one, held back. I knew she was “spiritual bypassing”, but it wouldn’t have been helpful to say that in the moment.

Oh! Last weekend, I watched police in Ibadan, Nigeria, storm a kidnappers’ hideout. So much yelling and noisemaking by these “brave police”. It sounded and looked like a cheaply produced skit, but real lives were at stake. Yelling like banshees while closing in on violent, armed villains could be because BOTH police and the kidnappers were terrified.

Maybe hypermasculine, viking type yelling helps the rampaging police feel more “in charge”? But yelling also puts operational strategy at risk, compromises sight and sound with avoidable sensory overload, and might even give one or two sneaky bandits the chance to creep away silently in the melee.

Importantly, yelling blatantly shocks the kidnapped children, who in addition to their trauma, have to permanently remember when a chaotic, screaming deluge of heavily armed banshees in black descended out of dark night.

Low emotional intelligence is also what gives politicians and their police, brazen confidence to storm a kidnappers’ hideout within 2 days, while over 40 previously kidnapped school children remain in limbo 25 days later. Don’t the barefaced, selfish optics matter?

Revolutions result when politicians stop caring what the masses feel about barefaced optics.

Emotional intelligence, in one more nutshell.

It’s a task we all have.

Schools can’t do it, because they are capitalist institutions, and they train us for things that can make money directly. Like Medicine or Architecture. Why should they bother to teach Emotional Intelligence? In any case, many adults who should be teachers, are themselves crippled by a lifetime of maturing physically without maturing emotionally.

I wish for us, that we can relate with one another in ways that read the room, and perceive the unspoken hearts of people around us, and make choices that are in all our best interests. When that day comes, we will be ready to eliminate bad politicians, including the kidnappers and other political bandits that work for the political class. And many jobs, families, and relationships will be saved, too.

And the next generation of children will be both safer and better than we are.

And, we will all live happily ever after.

Developing countries with fast growing, young populations and high unemployment, have different priorities from other countries.

Africa, for example, is not trying to solve the same problems the west is trying to solve.

As the world hurtles, brakes off, into the wild, uncharted abyss of artificial intelligence, Africa appears to be letting itself get dragged along.

The same way we were passive bystanders in previous Industrial Revolutions.

Our reaction is to mimic every step. Hold our own AI talk shops.

But, must we copy everything? Does everything that is designed by others, for others, also serve us?

2 Think first

Think. Original thought is the first law of Artificial Intelligence. If we don’t have our own plans or ideas, AI will work against us. The same way previous industrial revolutions profited the west, while still exploiting global south resources.

Why on earth do we expect this time to be different? What on earth are we doing differently?

We have come a long way from the beginning of time, when different cultures across Africa used original intelligence to solve problems. We are now swept up in a modern phenomenon where intelligence is being used to create brand new problems.

Tell me. Who needs unemployment?

Who needs the new dystopian future, the alarmist scenarios precipitated by headless, heedless threats of “the looming singularity”? And, who even decides these sorts of bizarre destinations, on our behalf?

3 Our AI

Artificial intelligence is often described as unprecedented, and fully western. But indigenous African knowledge systems pioneered its underlying logic.

Binary code.

Probabilistic reasoning.

Decision-making mathematical models.

Boolean algebra.

Memory computation.

Ifá, a Yoruba knowledge corpus has used binary code to generate predictive insights for over 8,000 years. Researchers like Olu Longe & Ron Eglash have traced a conceptual lineage from African binary systems through Arab geomancy and European alchemy to the work of Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century mathematician nowadays credited with formalising binary logic.

But, the version of predictive and generative intelligence made by the west has a different trajectory from all its predecessors. A devastating future event called the Singularity is predicted to be around the corner. Some say we are already in it.

It is the barely perceptible moment when machines surpass human intelligence and no longer need to be told what to do. When this point is reached, it will upend human life as we know it, causing rapid, uncontrollable, and irreversible changes to civilization.

Easy to predict: secretary type jobs, analytical roles or even manual labor, will disappear. Isn’t that 90% of what constitutes modern work? Those of us in healthcare jobs are told to prepare for a future where we are no longer the apex professionals, as we have been for hundreds of years.

This is where I differ.

4 Culture of Care

Living in Europe for 2 decades and counting, I have observed their culture of medical practice. It is good in many ways, deleterious in a few.

As a theoretical and clinical subject, there is nothing happening in western medicine that is not happening in the hospitals and medical schools where I was trained in Africa, sometimes even better. Western medicine does have a definite technological and research edge. But this is nothing better distribution of capital cannot solve. There is certainly not an innate human superiority in western medicine, despite centuries of fallacious race science and global health propaganda.

My point is, the arts of medicine and nursing, as practiced in the west, are slightly different, in the cultural context, from the more classical, more clinically oriented, more hands on, much more interpersonal healthcare culture in countries like Nigeria or Ghana.

And, I hope things stay that way.

I am alarmed that a time comes when African nurses and doctors become as impersonal and secretary-like as those I’ve seen in Europe.

It appears inevitable, given the acceleration of capitalism’s pressures, and our shortages of staffing, and growing populations. Conditions that respond well to algorithmic resource management and time efficiency: and what does AI do, if not analytical and algorithmic work?

In this sense, AI will take over.

But, this kind of human-absent medical care is also why the breakdown of social, community and mental health is accelerating across the west.

5 Stand Your Ground

In an alternative scenario, where African health systems place more value on our own indigenous cultures of care, and reject the replacement of the human interface by machines and algorithms, the AI replacement will never happen.

Yes, parts of our job will be taken over.

The note taking, analysis, diagnoses and manual surgical parts.

But, is that what makes a doctor, or a nurse? I certainly hope not.

In a viral 2026 essay on the looming AI-pocalypse, titled “something big is happening”, Matt Shumer, predicts: “AI is now building AI…exceeding human performance in… medical analysis, reading scans, lab results, suggesting diagnoses, reviewing literature,”

Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei prophesied “Within 1 to 5 years, AI could replace 50% of white-collar jobs. AI is coming for cognitive labor. All of it.”

He may be right. Except that real medicine is not just ‘cognitive labor’. It is emotional and human and physical, and most importantly, cultural. What works in the west as care, may actually exacerbate disease for someone raised with higher social standards and critical expectations regarding care.

However, when money is the chief metric for healthcare, and time is as scarce as it can be under capitalism, the stranglehold of AI on healthcare grows stronger.

That is why I’m calling for a medicine and nursing that upholds not just our Hippocratic commitment, but harks back to the traditions of Imhotep, Osanyin, and every Dibia, Sangoma, Babalawo and community nursing systems that predate the capitalist mode of medicine today.

Over the din of profit and privatization, can we choose to continue to prioritize models of care as human presence , connection and communication, over and above factory-floor modes of ‘efficiency’, time saving , and profits?

Or is that too much to ask?

6 Ideology of AI

These predicted AI singularity type outcomes will vary by culture.

Cultures where the human alternative is weak, such as the west, will go extinct.

Africa, where we function more on human-to-human connection should at least have more time to contemplate this path. I quote economist Jason Hickel when he says, “poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms, and aid only helps to hide this.” I quote this to point out that Africa is locked at the hip to the West, and this, not on terms favorable to us. And that, while the economic yoke is apparent, the forced mental colonialism is often debated.

Therefore, Africa’s professions, such as law, accounting, medicine, and so on, are all modeled as closely as possible to the west. In that way, we expect that whichever way the west goes, as far as technology adoption, Africa is bound to go. We will copy the ideas, but they will keep the profits. That’s the way the world has always been.

But must it be that way to the end? Why do we have a proverb about the fly that follows the deceased body into the grave? The west is going down fighting, and attempting to take everybody down with it – must we follow, or can we for the first time, outthink them, and center ourselves?

7 AI is Capitalism on Steroids

Important, if Africa and global south make the radical choice to decolonize and delink our Markets, policies and worldviews from Western led models, we might maybe escape the imposition of an AI dominant future.

The west developed AI to solve a problem they have, and as a strategy to build a future they are desperate for. AI’s ultimate goal is to defund, devalue and demonetize human labor.

Think of it as a historical progression from feudalism to slavery to colonization to neocolonialism and globalization and capitalism and finally artificial intelligence.

In each of these steps, labor is cheapened until the cost drops to zero and falls through the floor. Step by step, capital is accumulated completely until all of it belongs to the 1 percent at the top and the masses own nothing. Remember this is an actual quote popularized by that infamous gathering of untouchable elites, the World Economic Forum: “In the future you will own nothing and you will be happy”.

Capitalism was the beast that perfected this centuries long process, and AI is really just end stage capitalism.

No coincidence that AI coincides with the death throes of empire, unfolding in real time as Trump bares the imperial core’s true fangs, with tariffs and bombs going off ad nauseam.

The trick is to present AI as the ultimate technology when all it really is is the ultimate market tool, the ultimate capitalism, the veritable 5th Industrial Revolution.

As the 1st & 2nd revolutions were rooted in enslavement & colonization of the global south, especially Africa, the 3rd & 4th are based on dehumanization, illicit extraction and capital violence. This final Industrial Revolution will be at its heart, still unethical, immoral and antihuman.

8 AI for Good

Of course mainstream narratives will avoid this, and instead present AI as a technological revolution. History has always been best understood only in hindsight. But you don’t have to be like that. You can understand it before it happens. That’s why we study, and refuse to be drowned in matrix hoopla.

The coming implosion can hardly be resisted or controlled by individuals, but if the global south as a group, and in particular Africa as one collective, the source of the industrial minerals that power modern technology, can stand its ground, delink itself and unintegrate its economies and politics, from centuries-long exploitation and unequal positioning within the extractive global order, there’s a glimmer of a chance the west will die alone, and the rest of us will be saved from this latest Anthropocene, this end time extinction, this final apocalypse disguised as technological singularity.

Listen. All of this fatalism, the apocalyptic scenarios and human-deleting use cases of AI are by deliberate design. Other choices could’ve been made.

Instead of endless new wars, maybe AI for world peace?

Instead of homeless people on the streets of New York and Amsterdam, maybe affordable housing?

Instead of millions dying of curable and potentially eradicable diseases, maybe AI for good health?

What happened to our post-WWII mantra, Health for All?

AI could have solved not only the scientific basis, but also the governance necessary to distribute #UniversalHealthCoverage.

But we are here. In that other universe where nobody gives a fadoodle about who lives, or a floccinaucinihilipilification about who dies.

In spite of AI, our modern lives are infrequently mired in tight time schedules and daily traffic: the associated cortisol-spiked stress-related, chronic diseases cost the US economy $4.4 trillion, or (90%) of the nation’s total annual healthcare spending.

Think about it, instead of maddening traffic and overstretched, inefficient public transport, what about a new age of AI for fast and efficient public transportation systems?

Instead of eleventh-hour climate crisis, how about AI solutions to our various environmental catastrophes, all driven by unmitigated capitalism?

Do we need more war, and more digital spying, or on the other hand, maybe, the ability to have our needs met without spending all our time at work? How about care for the disabled and elderly?

But a system driven by the endless pursuit of profit only makes human life worse, AI or no.

AI could have served human needs on a global scale, at a faster rate than we’ve ever seen.

But, capitalism: the goal of which has never been to make anything better, but everything cheaper for the capitalist overlords.

So, AI will continue to fulfill all the most toxic traits of capitalism, but finally remove the last shreds of any possible accountability, as human interface is rendered redundant by the sovereign will of a very few super-elite, who will remain beyond the veil, and who will be exempt from total surrender and utter subjugation to the coming Anthropocene.

Sources

Fractals at the heart of African design

https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_the_fractals_at_the_heart_of_african_designs

Ifa & computer science

https://www.google.ca/books/edition/If%C3%A1_Divination_and_Computer_Science/u19dXwAACAAJ?hl=en&kptab=overview

AI & capitalism

https://x.com/caitoz/status/1982252101066731913?s=20

AI is now building the next AI

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/something-big-happening-matt-shumer-so5he?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via

On the Risks of Powerful AI

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology

Now, in part 2 of What’s wrong with our idea of budgets?, we are going to show that our health budgets have never been about health.

What do we typically budget for?

WHAT on earth, specifically, are our health budgets for? We say they are for health, but, what is health, to a budgeter? Now if you’ve ever seen any budget in Nigeria, whether federal or state, you will know that for the past 60 years, every budget devotes 70% or more, to salaries and recurrent expenditure.

If our health budget follows that pattern, then health is going nowhere.

Health cannot be achieved by paying health workers. Now don’t get me wrong - these people have worked for their money. But paying salaries is not a health matter at all: it is properly a labor matter, period. It is also an economic matter.

Our health budgets must change their major line items from mostly salaries, to actual health issues: such as capital expenditure, institutional development, research, manufacturing, logistics & service delivery.

These are the ‘moving parts’ of our health systems. For now, who pays for these actual health system parts? Donors. And, even then, only in part. Meaning, these building blocks of health systems are mostly underfunded or unfunded. Can you see now why we have weak to no health systems? It’s not ‘corruption’: it’s that we are misbudgeting and mismanaging the basic idea of money and budgets. Maybe, we’ve never had to think about it?

Are we asking the right questions?

It’s not just in Nigeria or Africa: worldwide, there is no universally fixed “recommended” proportion of a country’s budget for recurrent vs capital expenditure. But, if we start to think for ourselves, we will recognize how uniquely important it can be, for countries at earlier stages of development to free up their budgets from vicious salary cycles. Start budgeting better so we can spend on productivity, capital, systems and institutions, and not just on perennial cycles of consumption and debt repayment.

Whatever questions need to be asked, whatever productivity-focused policy changes need to be acted upon, let us not hold back from these original ideas, basic questions and formative choices.

Where do we start?

A developing country with large masses of poor and excluded people CAN NOT depend on a private led health system. In the sticky web of globalization, public sector leadership can be a literal matter of life and death.

Because most of health supply in Nigeria is private, our Out of Pocket (OPP) payments are among the highest in the world. Donor financing cannot fill the gap. One reason why, is that, for every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment. Donor dependency creates a vicious cycle that actually crowds out public spending on health.

How can we transition away from foreign aid?

In the closing chapters of Global Health in Practice (2022), Dr. Olusoji Adeyi makes stepwise recommendations for pivoting away from foreign aid for health.

We can immediately accept full financial responsibility for the building blocks of health. With better planning, we can budget for essential medicines and basic health services. We can refocus foreign aid toward more complex strategic reforms. This can give us enough time to transition.

The refocused technical assistance can scale up home-grown research networks, think tanks, insurance systems, disease surveillance, manufacturing technology, and integrated health systems. By 2030, our health sector should be locally financed, in line with global consensus on sustainable development.

The assumption itself is not natural - it was indoctrinated through propaganda, colonial education and religious belief. Indoctrinated, so that said co-dwellers can extend neocolonial extraction & capital violence in perpetuity.

With minimum resistance.

But, we just might change our attitude to life, if one day, Africans collectively wake up and confront the truth, that we have been placed on a planet, surrounded by hostile, violent enemies who have been eliminating us steadily for 400 years.

And, that, no one, is coming to save us.

And that, there’s no white heaven in the afterlife to forfeit our earthly responsibilities for.

And that there’s no devil in hell because the devil has been here in our business 400 years long.

And that, we are here in this hostile planet, sitting atop most of its resources, especially energy, which our enemy does not have; and as competition for these critical minerals and other non renewable resources tightens, our better armed co-dwellers are eventually going to need to take us out of the way.

What if we confront these existential truths? Would we maybe start to do things differently?

There is only one thing, not 2, not 3, just one, by which the enemy is superior: violence.

On this one thing Africa must focus, in order to secure a permanent exit from this 400 year rat race. Disrupt, once and for all, this trans generational series of back to back nightmares.

When enslaved Africans were transported coast to coast, naked, on those deep-hulled ships, the only thing that repressed uprisings was not their captors numbers or muscles or beauty or brilliance, but guns.

Fast forward, when President Trump crudely disrupts the colonial celebration of Christmas in Nigeria, it is not with words or intelligence or even money, but bombs.

Weapons are The One Thing.

The one thing white people have that Africans don’t have. And the one thing they have, that we need too.

We don’t need aid. We don’t even need transfer of technology. That’s a stupid idea - it suggests technology stays one place so you have to “transfer” it. Absurd. Wherever humans are, wherever nature is, technology is there. Historically Africa innovated everything, still can, once it deprograms.

Only one thing we need to aspire to: pancontinental military and weapon technology that asserts dominance. Dominance in a world where we have everything, and everyone else wants what we have.

Will it be easy to do? The answer is that we don’t even have a choice. The ease of it is a non question. We are already being eliminated. 2026 will likely see a scaling up of western aggression, indirectly through hostile policy changes, and directly through war.

Africa will not be ready in one year. But we can show that we are clear about the threat facing us. A seed has already matured in the Sahel, and it is small, but it will eventually envelop whatever will be left of Africa, whatever survives the wars of external aggression.

And, just in case anyone hasn’t noticed, the war isn’t coming:

it’s already on our soil.

Still: Africa’s rise is inevitable. Our ancestors who resisted maafa, their enslavement and subsequent colonization, called for this. Not all of us will see this to the end. Many of us will be swept away in it. Our individual experiences don’t count, as much as our collective contribution to what will become New Africa.

Do we want peace & security? Sustainable development? Education? Health? Housing for all? Everything is tied to politics. And to change the politics, Africa also has to challenge the geopolitics. And, the first law of the global political economy is deterrence with the left hand, while building with the right.

As Africa goes, so does the whole planet. Even if they all look the other way now, their own survival on this deadly, now dying planet, depends on Africa. Climate crisis is the planet’s final answer to the unsustainable, imbalanced, violent exploitation of the many to develop the few. When Africa gets back in the driver’s seat, our planet will finally know peace. But, if we want peace, we must be prepared for war.

In countries like Nigeria, most of health supply is in private hands. As a result, Out of Pocket (OPP) payments are among the highest in the world. This is incompatible with development. Because of its dependence on a global logistic chain that is largely foreign to recipient countries, donor financing quickly turns into a vicious cycle that crowds out public spending. Economists call this tight relationship between productivity and health expenditure, the first law of health economics.

For millions of working class poor to survive, one, we have to end donor financing, and two, we have to end the foreign technical advice that leads to donor dependency.

Contrary to donor-supported thinking, for developing countries to get on their feet, their health systems have to be publicly owned, funded, and advised by government & indigenous experts. Perpetual funding without personal responsibility and accountability only breeds spoilt children. Or, as one famous children’s story puts it, if you pay, you dictate.

But: there is a role for the private sector in pharmaceuticals, logistics and services. This economic space must be tightly regulated. In that tight space, the supply chain must be all-local. An import based, and purely for-profit motive will only exclude millions of vulnerable people from the supply of health.

Drug manufacture

For a health system worth the name, we have to do this non-health thing: develop industrial capacity. Drugs, consumables & disposables have to be locally manufactured and in bulk.

We can’t hope to build a health system on drug imports because access will then be limited by end user cost. Local production will help lower end user costs and if scaled up, it will guarantee access and availability. Production will be fully subject to regulation, competitive pricing, innovation, consumer-oriented markets and competitive distribution.

Standardization of quality

Health facilities and service quality must also be standardized. A single, locally sourced standard must be applicable, replicable & regulable, anywhere, nationwide. But then, again, building systems, construction materials and rules of service cannot exist in isolation from generalized poverty. If we have too many poor people, they will be forced to prioritize cheap materials over quality, resulting in a haphazard uncontrolled construction culture. We can’t expect to regulate quality when we can’t determine if those inputs and materials are easily available locally.

Skills & spare parts

We also need to build local capacity for standard-quality construction skills, spare parts and tools for maintenance. In addition to physical, non-imported, local manufacturable or assemblable materials, quality of the workmanship itself, as a type of service delivery, must be set to one single standard. This same standard must be applicable in every facility, no matter where located, in a big city or even the most remote villages.

See? We must not think in silos about health. All this is a development problem, not a health problem, still, it determines health outcomes.

Backward thinking & antiquated systems will persist if we continue to allow foreign technical advisers and donor agents to come to tell us about health quality. Because of their limited budgets, self-interest and geopolitics, they can not afford to go into the necessary detail: that there is a whole-of-government approach, outside of health itself, to build truly independent health systems.

We are always left feeling like moral failures. We learn helplessness and dependency on their drip drop donations, and top-down advice. It takes a holistic, in depth deconstruction of a century of slow or no development, to finally answer why our health systems are still stuck in the stone age, since the stone age. Our aim should be policy meetings without a single foreign technical adviser or donor in the room, where all ministries and agencies regardless of sector, collaborate.

As the economy develops, and each sector is growing, a healthy, secure and insured population will be the result.

In my candid view, it doesn’t matter what percentage of a budget we devote to health. Whatever the number, 5 percent? 10 percent? 15 percent? Take Nigeria for example. Our range of budget percentages is wide - while states like Imo have about 3 percent for health, states like Kano devote about 15 percent.

Yet not one of them is effective in delivering quality health for all.

Productivity first

The real question we should be asking is, what percent of what???

In the Nigerian example, all states are economically non self-sustaining, with an unproductive focus on federal allocations. Relative to our state populations, our economies are tiny. Tiny because, we produce nothing, all 36 of us. We were bottled fed from birth and now 36 old men are still collecting from mummy. Because of this developmental anomaly, our entire state budgets are so insignificant, that any sector budget is inherently a drop in the ocean.

5 percent, 10 percent of nothing, is still nothing.

Think at Scale

The population of the average Nigerian state is the size of several actual countries. Until our economic productivity increases to reflect our population sizes, and our actual economic needs, “meeting the Abuja declaration target” will be both impossible and ineffective.

What then is a practical scale for our health budgets?

Imagine if for example, one Nigerian state can have the same total budget as the Netherlands, a country which has a smaller population than many Nigerian states? Then, 5 to 10 percent of that would be something, wouldn’t it? There’s no Nigerian state that is not more resource endowed than the Netherlands. But there is also no Nigerian state that even one tenth as productive as the Netherlands.

Now, the Netherlands devotes just 10 to 11 percent of its total budget to health. In principle, why can’t Kano state for example, which devotes a whopping 15 percent, have a better health system than the Netherlands?

Because, 15 percent of nothing is still nothing.

Economic productivity is not a major point in most donor technical advise. In fact, donors are more likelyy to say that health will lead to economic productivity, instead the other way around. You already know why: if we start to understand economic productivity, donors will be put out of business.

Let’s answer one quick question: what low-hanging, immediate aspects of economic productivity are key to develop health systems?

Geopolitical Objective of Donors

The primary reason is that aid is designed for the strategic objectives of the donor. This strategy is two-fold. Geopolitical and economic.

Development assistance for health is part of positive signaling within a wider global governance structure. Geopolitical objectives include keeping funded countries psychologically dependent on both financing and foreign technical advice.

As missionaries were to colonization, so is the aid industry to neocolonialism. In each case, the link is never apparent, except in retrospect.

Even when donors are fronted by locals, such as indigenous health sector leaders, researchers or report writers, the practice of donor funding, or Development Assistance for Health (DAH), grew out of a post WW2 colonial objective. It used to be called ‘charity’: a more refined way of maintaining western geopolitical and colonial control, through economic leverage.

Economic leverage includes wider, global levers, such as trade agreements and preconditions for financing that maintain old hierarchies in new ways. One Yorùbá proverb says, “Òkè lọwọ afúnii gbé,” which implies that the giver’s hand remains “on top”.

For this purpose, donors are part of a wider global system which keeps countries that receive funding dependent, by providing just enough financing with one hand, but also imposing conditions, recycling debts, restricting global trade and securing military objectives.

Economic Objective of Donors

Secondly, and equally important is the economic objective. The donor system guarantees a supply chain for manufacture, and global distribution of health products. This economic objective funnels donor money through the global banking system, back to the countries where it was donated from: with profit. Recent research shows aid plays a key role in helping donor countries secure access to critical minerals.

We can agree that the historical and global context of the donor system is fairly complex, and not always obvious at the point of delivery. We can also, clearly see that is not in the interests of donors to permanently solve the problem. If they do, they, their governments, their banks, corporations and other partners will be out of business.

Look no further than the current cold war between the West and China to see the geopolitical and economic reaction to economic competition, or any potential disruption of the global hierarchy that has existed since WW2.

Aid is designed to keep recipient countries coming for more, but still never develop enough to completely exit the cycle. A recent UN report reminds us, in case we forget, that the “C” in the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), originally stood for ‘Colonial’. In 1966, the acronym was, ahem, modernized. If on the other hand we prefer to believe that nearly a century of donor dependence is all about ‘charity’, then, perhaps we are not yet ready to build independent, sustainable health systems?

A recent report, the SBM Health Preparedness Index, published 6th November 2025, assesses the capacity of Nigeria’s 36 states to respond to health emergencies. Its findings show that none reached even 30% preparedness. The report concludes states have fragile health systems.

Low budgets, poor infrastructure, and medical brain drain are the key culprits. The report expects policy to fix these findings.

Useful as it seems, a report like this is still scratching the superficial surface. Its findings, though health-sounding, are actually, non-health issues.

We can’t fix health systems, if we don’t dig deeper: with our own tools. Donor sponsored reports, such as this, cannot provide a harvest of answers.

In fact, they are not designed to.

Donors are limited by design

Outside of their strategic objectives, donors don’t have any dog in this fight. They can’t offer no-strings technical advice, or altruistic financing.

Not their circus, not their monkeys.

Until developing countries ourselves start generating our own original ideas, no thorough analysis of health systems can emerge. Generational cycles of dependence on development assistance for health will persist.

In 2009, Harvard trained, Zambian born economist, Baroness Dambisa Moyo argued that despite a half century and more than $1 trillion, development assistance has not improved the lives of Africans.

Moyo’s radical insight was not well received. Billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates, said Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid was “promoting evil” and that “she didn’t know much about aid”.

Even pro-poor former World Bank economist Jeffery Sachs denounced Moyo’s views as “cruel and mistaken.”

In a twist on religious fears of the antichrist, the New York Times branded the Zambian economist the “anti-Bono”.

Two decades after Dead Aid, donor envelopes have shrunk, local health spending has not grown, and debt traps have gone through the roof. Many countries are in panic mode.

After nearly a century of dependence on aid and technical advice, why do donors still not have the answer? In the next edition, I will provide 2 reasons why this is by design. We must first challenge our sources of thinking, for Donor Assistance for Health (DAH) to end, and new health systems to begin.

1. The problem of health is not in the health sector.

2. Health is an outcome of other, non-health things.

3. No minister of health can fix health.

4. It stands to reason, that in a developing economy, health cannot be developed unless the other non-health sectors are also moving forward. This is because, although policy sectors are categorized separately, in real life they work side by side, like interlocked gears. The entire national economy is one machine, and health is only one of its moving gears; if other, non-health sectors slow down or are not moving forward, health will also grind to a halt.

Hi. My name is Ayo Adene.

For 25 years, I’ve been working to bring health care to large populations in 50 countries. In this series, I share original insights, outside of hospitals, outside of the usual policy conversations. If you’ve ever wondered why health systems are not working, this is your newsletter.

Some of the answers we will find also apply, not only in health, but in every other sector. We will see that for health itself to develop, we need to tackle economic productivity and broader development. And that this cannot be a secondary consideration at all.

Health is a generational burden. If we don’t grasp these first principles, we will trapped in one more failed cycle. For many developing countries, tasks that take longer than one election cycle, are relegated. To see the results of all the hard work done by several generations of health workers and policy makers, we have to transcend politics itself.

But, health is too important to leave to health workers and politicians alone. This conversation is for everybody.

If you’re ready, type ‘yes’ in the comments below, and let’s go!